JFK trip was a turning point in Ireland

THE four-day visit to Ireland by US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Jun 1963 is seen as a turning point in the country’s modern history, writes Ray Ryan

Many people regard it as the key event that marked Old Ireland finally giving way to New Ireland in a rapidly changing world.

The website of the committee which has organised a JFK50 celebration in Kennedy’s ancestral town of New Ross in Co Wexford, notes the significance of the visit: “He came to a country that was changing. Ireland, so long isolated, was at last ready to take her place among the nations of the earth.”